Should I use email marketing companies?
What I found is that some of these email marketing companies are very unethical in their business practices. They will tell you that they have so many thousand recipients, let's say they say "We'll give you one million doctors", and they punch it out for you. You send in a thing and they, for a thousand dollars or whatever, send it out to a million doctors. It turns out that it wasn't one million doctors; it was one million email addresses, period. So, you got to be careful. I think the thing I would advise if you want to do email is that you deal with a company that's been in the mailing list business for a long time in direct marketing, and you can find them through the Direct Marketing Association, and see if they're handling these types of lists well. They tend to be, in my opinion, more reliable than some of those that have sprung up over the last five or ten years, which just don't have any background and are not being very careful about their segmentation. However, in some cases these companies have people that have opted in and already expressed an interest in certain types of products; in that situation, it's not spam. So, that would make it valid. Another way of course is to send an email campaign to those on your own mailing list. Nowadays, a lot of times when you buy certain things, they say "Would you like to sign up for our newsletter", or whatever, and now they have you on their list and they can promote their products in their newsletter as well. That's another way of advertising using the internet; in other words, in your newsletter. You've got the mailing list, you've got a lot of good information for these people (editorial information), but you can also advertise for your product and your services at the same time.
